I often have difficulty knowing when I should stop eating. How do you know you have had enough to eat?
Here’s a few methods I have tried -
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Counting calories. I find this too complicated and pedantic for my absentmindedness. At times, it is hard to get the calorific value of what I am eating and total it all up. I am too lazy to have even tried this seriously.
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Stop eating when you are full. This seems to be the worst thing one can do. I have read and intuitively feel that the stomach should be less than full after a meal, or it is overburdened.
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In my yoga school they suggested - “eat not so that you are full, but so that you are not hungry”. This is probably the best suggestion I have heard. I often follow this, but it can also mean that I will be hungry just half an hour or one hour after the meal. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. It can also mean that I am not hungry after 4 spoons of rice, or something as small as that.
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In the Sufi tradition they say one should eat so that one third of the stomach is full with food, one third with water, and one third is empty. Sounds good and close to other good advice I have heard, but I have a hard time knowing what is one third of my stomach. How does one know that? Are there any sensations that are helpful in this? The two sensations I am familiar with are a slight burning sensation, which is perhaps the gasses in the stomach telling me I need to eat, and the other is the food pressing against the walls of the stomach, which tells me I am coming close to filling up the stomach. It is hard to know what is one third and two third.
How do you know you have had enough to eat, so that you don’t gain weight and get adequate energy and nutrition?
